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Oldcynic writes "The Canadian mint has allowed 500 developers to enter a contest to create a new digital currency. The currency would allow micro payments using electronic devices. From the article: 'Less than a week after the government announced the penny’s impending death, the Mint quietly unveiled its digital currency called MintChip.
Still in the research and development phase, MintChip will ultimately let people pay each other directly using smartphones, USB sticks, computers, tablets and clouds. The digital currency will be anonymous and good for small transactions — just like cash, the Mint says.
To make sure its technology meets the gold standard in a world where digital transactions are gaining steam, the Mint is holding a contest for software developers to create applications using the MintChip.'" It looks like the Canadian Mint might have a bit of Sweden envy.

I don't think that's right. In Nova Scotia and in places like London, Ontario, people speak very strongly in that way and many of them don't know any French. I thought it had to do with the fact that so many of the original Canadians were Scots, and in Scotland they also say "a-BOOt" and "a-GAIN-st".

I lived in London for 15 years and never heard anyone speak in a way that was reminiscent of "aboot".I'm on PEI now, where I grew up, and you'll find that in the fishing villages that were originally french there's people who say "dis, dat, dese, and dose" for "this, that, these, and those" and some other humorous applications, as artifacts of their ancestors pronunciation of 'th' and other letter combinations.Most people I know pronounce 'about' with the latter syllable sounding like a 'bout' of boxing.In the game studio I worked at we had people from all over the world, and it was noticeable in at least one American that they pronounced 'about' with an extra beat in the 'ow' part. So a two syllable word sounded like it had three syllables. Kind of a reverse of the Japanese tendency to remove syllables from pronunciation in common speech. (The name Asuka for example, which we'd hear as Oska)Meanwhile If I talk to someone from the southern US, they think I have a funny accent. If I talk to someone from the west coast or someone that speaks with the common 'broadcast' dialect (notice that most major anchorpeople have a "neutral" accent) we can't immediately identify the area the other is from.But there's also just as much dialect variety here as the US. Just like "Bawston" and "Bal'more", or down in "Noble's Holler" (Yay, Justified). Probably not as much as Scotland though.:) I've read that in Scotland the separation of villages by as little at 10 miles could have villages barely able to understand each other in the "old days".Language is neat!

Canadian Rising is the cause. Its a linguistic distinction in much of English Canada (and some parts of the northern US) which alters the pronunciation of a few vowels combinations, essentially shortening the time it takes to make them. Most US English speakers do not make the distinction, and thus hear the sound differently, mistaking/au/ for/u/.Its laughable to Canadians who can hear the distinction because the Americans seem clueless for not being able to hear it, but its just a matter of dialect. Most

That's the really strange part, unless you go south of Oregon, Americans don't sound very different to us Canadians. Then again, I live on the west coast, so there is a less french influence over here...

Where are you from? When I visited out in Halifax I didn't notice it as much as when I visited northern Minnesota / Wisconsin. I'm going to guess that central canada has it a bit heavier than where ever you are from.

Even more amusing would be digital currency tripping over a patent or two, only to discover a few years down the track, Canada locked into making patent payments for 10% or more of the electronic currency they are trading.

Why would you assume that? Since governments print the money and different governments share techniques on how to make it counterfeit proof, it would just be a trade secret. There's no point in making a patent on it.

They disclose many of the anti-counterfeiting techniques, especially the obvious ones like the new hundred I just got. Hard to hide that it is plastic, has holograms and even a transparent window on it. The idea is as much to discourage people from even trying to counterfeit as well as catching them.

Why would you assume that? Since governments print the money and different governments share techniques on how to make it counterfeit proof, it would just be a trade secret. There's no point in making a patent on it.

Of course there is, just because you are are printing money doesn't mean you don't want to make money.
Securency (involved in producing a lot of modern polymer notes [securency.com.au]) certainly hold patents on techniques they use.

In my personal experience of royalty claims... the claimant will want to be paid for any conceivable use of the "technology" even if it really has nothing to do with them. Create a unit, pay them. Transfer the unit, pay them. Bank the unit, pay them. Collect interest on the banked unit, pay them. Convert the unit into "real" money, pay them. Produce any sort of system that can be used to handle the units, pay them. Do the same thing on a mobile, pay them.... or a social network etc. There's no com

Digital currency just means the Central bank can wipe-out our savings more efficiently (by devaluing the dollar). You work and scrimp to save a million dollars for retirement. But by the time you're an old man, its purchasing power will be diminished to just 100,000 thanks to the actions of the rich bankers,

We're heading in the wrong direction. We should be looking for a STABLE currency that can not be devalued.

I think this is 2 completely unrelated problems. What this article is talking about is a way to exchange Canadian Dollars with people without physically carrying and handing them paper bills or metal coins. The currency itself isn't changing, just the method of transfering it.

As for devaluation. This is actually a touchy subject, in some ways currency needs to devalue, doing so stops people from sitting on vast piles of it and keeps them spending it which keeps the economy going, which generates jobs, and allows more people to spend money. Of course it also needs not to devaluate too quickly for the reason you list in that you have to be able to save for future big purchases, and be able to save money for retirement. Balancing the 2 is very tricky, but also completely unrelated to this particular initiative.

Currency does not need to be devalued, devaluation is theft. Hoarding is a false argument made by people who confuse money with wealth. Balancing the flow of wealth (ie: money) is indeed very tricky, so tricky in fact that it cannot be planned by a central authority using fanciful economic models but should rather be left to free markets. So fuck off "independent" central banks with your fractional reserve bullshit, the power to create money belongs only to the people.

I would like every libertarian to conduct the following thought experiment:

What happens if one king owns all the gold?

I don't know what will happen when a libertarian conducts this experiment. I just know what happened when I conducted it. First, I realized that gold would have no use as currency in such a situation. All the other people in the kingdom would use silver. If the king owned all the silver, they would keep finding subsitutes in turn until they had something that circulated in reasonable amm

So, basically you are saying government (aka "the King") can distort economies. Surprise, surprise!

That said, gold does have a tangible value, in that it represents X amount of labor to move Y tons of raw ore + Z amount of energy to refine it to a known amount of bullion, coin, ring, chain or what-have-you. In contrast to a printed banknote, of any denomination, that currently has only the tiniest of a fraction of worth compared to the "gold standard".

I don't know that the work required to retrieve it is what gives gold an intrinsic value. Its intrinsic value is in its uses. Its properties as a metal. Anything more than that is circular. It has value because it takes effort to retrieve it and we retrieve it because it has value. I've always thought a currency backed by units of energy would be interesting. Since we've industrialized it arguably has the most intrinsic value to society.

doing so stops people from sitting on vast piles of it and keeps them spending it which keeps the economy going, which generates jobs

Shhhhhh. Do you want people to figure out who the real job creators are? Let them, just once, count up how many jobs it costs if a million fewer people have the money to spend on nice things and they'll never vote for us.

Why do you think that the "digital" attribute is what enable them to do that? Like they aren't doing it already with printed banknotes or minted coins? You think it cost them much to add other 3 zeroes on a note?

Economy doesn't need to be run, it's not a car. It's like saying that ecosystems need to be run or the weather needs to be run or the water circulation needs to be run. It just happens because there are naturally existing forces that initiate actions.Just look at the track record of human interventions in ecosystems to make it better. Aral Sea nearly gone, Australia is full of nasty foreign species that were to fix an existing problem, but caused greater one, Aswan Dam has its own share of problems. That's how good people are at controlling things they don't understand.

Thanks to decades of debt-heavy "optimization" geared to inflate the holy GDP metric, we have a global economy that is at the brink of collapse.

Not an economist here. However, if I am not mistaken, what makes an economy effective, is the exchange of money between its members.

What most businesses, economists and governments seem focused on is growth. If that means more people exchanging money, no problem. But if it refers to expansion of the economy by means of producing increasing amounts of raw materials then surely that is not sustainable in the long term? For instance, there is only a fixed available amount of timber we can harvest before we are denuding the Earth of its forests (the current method it seems). Surely its better to try to build a sustainable economic model so that our resources last us as long as possible no?

The other fallacy I think we see banded about is that if we give the ultra-rich corporations breaks on taxes, or support them via government bailouts, that they will then take that money and use it to create jobs. It seems to me that a lot of businesses accept the bailout gratefully, then put most of it in the bank to hedge their bets on future success. I would like to see some proof of this "trickle-down" concept, because what I see is various businesses being propped up by various governments and then either walking away with the money, or using it to create jobs - overseas, where they can maximize the benefits to them by utilizing cheap labor.

It seems to me that most jobs are being created by the small companies that open up and close regularly all around us. It might only be a job here or there but I bet the net aggregate of all those jobs is far greater than that represented by the occasional mass expansion of a major corporation here or there. Unfortunately all I seem to see of late is small businesses going out of business with nothing to replace them.

MintChip operates in either an online or an offline mode. The online most is basically the same as EMV cards used in europ. The offline mode relies entirely on a master secret key which is on every single mintchip.

Let me repeat that, the security of offline transactions is based entirely on a secret which is on every single mintchip.

That's what I was thinking. How do you have digital currency that is anonymous? Makes no sense to me. Either there is a verifiable record of the transaction on some 3rd party machine to ensure that money was actually transferred from one account to another, which means it's not anonymous, or it is anonymous, but depends on some hard-to-break DRM going on inside the card. The problem is that there's just too much to be gained from breaking the DRM. If you break the DRM you can basically print money. This is the same problem that's existed on all non-centrally managed payment cards. From photocopier cards to transit systems. People figure out how to break the DRM and charge up their card as much as they want. When it's photocopies and transit, there's isn't much lost or gained in breaking the system. But with something that's actually equivalent with cash, there's room for a lot of fraud.

In the digital cash context, anonymous or more properly, untracability, means the bank cannot correlate withdrawals with deposits. When you present a coin to the bank for deposit or exchange for an unspent coin, they know it is a good coin because it has a valid RSA signature, for instance, but they have no idea to whom they gave the coin originally. David Chaum patented a scheme based on RSA in the late 80's and his student Stefan Brands came up with another scheme (and there may be others.) Offline sup

An RSA signature by itsel can verify that something is what it says it is and has not been modified, but it cannot verify that something hasn't been copied (or *is* a copy). There needs to be something else as well.

Well it can work like a prepay card. You put money on it with some code or whatever and a server registers the value on it. The places you pay get the confirmation from the server and server registers that the card has less money on it. You don't need a name associated with it.

My hope is that this is a misunderstanding or simplification generated by either a PR person or reporter and not in fact what the people designing this have done.

What I find more likely (assuming they are doing this even remotely right) is that it relies on some form of cryptography where each MintChip as it's own unique security key that is secret from other users. Not security through obscurity, but rather public/private key cryptography which would be the only safe way to do this properly.

Let me get this straight: MintChip is a proprietary, patented, centralized, unpublished cryptosystem, where a trusted-third-party (the Mint) signs a certificate saying "this private key was stored in a tamper-resistant hardware token that is designed not to double-spend", so we're supposed to just be able to assume that any valid MintChip transaction signatures are trustworthy, even offline. As soon as one person extracts a private key from a MintChip token (which they will, given that there's a monetary incentive), the fundamental assumption that the whole system relies upon is destroyed.

Your organization appears to know this, which explains why you emphasize that MintChip is intended for "low value" transactions.

Fine, so the security of the whole system depends on the security of these hardware tokens, and yet you're "not in a position to release" any tangible information about them? Why should anyone invest in this system? Because you're The Mint?

You have the threat model wrong, too. Why on earth would you want to emulate cash? Cash is easy to counterfeit. It only remains useful because there's a high risk vs. payoff associated with uttering counterfeit cash. On the other hand, MintChip is supposed to be used online, so even if we detect a counterfeit, there's not much chance that the fraudster will actually go to jail. There's also a much larger number of potential fraudsters (basically, everyone connected to the Internet).

MintChip also doesn't deliver on its privacy claims. "No personal data is exchanged in the transaction." That's not true at all. According to your documentation, every MintChip has a *single*, 16-digit ID that's generated by the central authority and used in all transactions, so there's no reason why these IDs couldn't be tracked the way companies already track credit card numbers.

The funny thing is that this all could have been implemented on top of Bitcoin. Make some tamper-resistant hardware with some Bitcoin private keys inside it, and sign a certificate saying "the keys for these addresses are in tamper-proof hardware". For low-value transactions, they could be accepted at face value, but if we wanted greater certainty, we could inject the transaction into the Bitcoin network and wait for a few confirmations to avoid double-spend fraud.

To clarify, I mean that there probably isn't a single secret that's on all the MintChips. There is probably one private key per MintChip, but you are correct that the security of the whole system appears to depend on all of these private keys remaining secret from their users. Good luck with that, indeed!

I'm actually all for digital currency. But there are a few caveats, the obvious security ones apply, don't want people copying my digital money, don't want people stealing my digital money, don't want people creating money out of thin air. But in addition it needs to have a few other characteristics:- Doesn't cost me anything to use. This is why I currently ignore Interac email transfers and still write people cheques, it's much cheaper for me. (even if it should be in the bank's best interest to push me the other direction, the cheque should be a lot more expensive for them to process!)- Isn't tied to any one platform. Don't tell me I need an iPhone, or a Windows PC, or any other specific device, make it work on just about anything (obviously within reason)- Anonymous. (listed in the summary, so it's a good start, but I can't emphasize enough that you will never get rid of physical currency as long as you make all your digital currency leave a trail)- Hard to lose. I don't want to lose all my cash to a hard drive crash, or other similar event, so I need to either be able to back it up, or better yet not have to. (of course this is very difficult to accomplish while maintaining both anonymity and security, but there are a lot of bright minds out there, hopefully someone can come up with a good way to do it.)- Ideally non-network dependent. A couple of years ago requiring an internet connection for the transaction would have been a deal breaker, but with the increased ubiquity of the internet on mobile devices this has lowered somewhat in priority. I still think though that you need to be able to pay someone without necesarily having network access at the time.

So its obvious for money but not obvious for other digital commodities like music? The 'I should be allowed to copy digital music' argument goes it is not stealing since I'm only making a copy of what you have and am not depriving you of any property. If I make a copy of your digital money is that not the same thing?

I think we do. There's a lot of zealotry out there. I lot of vigorous disagreement over whether it's ok to be, say, gay or not. Get an abortion or not. Use one kind of drug or another. Be a member of one religion or another. I should be free to anonymously buy...whatever gay people buy...if I want. I should be able to go anonymously buy a nice bottle of scotch. I can now. If I want to drop a $20 in the collection plate, I can and no one's the wiser.

We should be able to focus less on proving we didn't do anything wrong and more on the idea that we don't HAVE to prove we didn't do anything wrong. The whole presumption of innocence thing, ya know?

three of those are mutually exclusive, to a certain extent: Can't lose to a hard drive crash, not network dependent, and secure.

As are the "anonymity" and "can't lose to a hard drive crash" (replace HDD with whatever will support a mutable information about the amount of coins you store - "engraving" coins on a ROM won't make the coin digital).

you know that bit of plastic with my information encoded on the back, I swipe it into a miniature computer where that information wisks away to be validated and approved... fucking smoke signals?

its just a pet peeve of mine... digital

digital currency, fucking already have itdigital distribution, thank god, those fucking analog CD's and DVD's were so poor sounding when I copied them in my cardigital download, how the hell else is that going to work?

I dont know what shit for brains started replacing "internet" with "digital' but its fucking retarded

a creadit/debit card is not a form of currency. you do not trade credit cards with other people. it is essentially part of an authentication system that allows you to connect to a banks system and authorise a payment to someone else. you can not recieve payment using one.

digital distribution, thank god, those fucking analog CD's and DVD's were so poor sounding when I copied them in my car

those cd's and dvd's that contain digital content however were distributed via physical means. unless you have some sort of futuristic 3d printer and access to a service which will digitally transfer the required data for said printer to 'c

The Canadian mint is releasing a quarter with a dinosaur on it where, when you turn off the light, a glow in the dark image of it's skeleton [cnet.com.au] shows up. I find this more interesting and relevant to my day to day life than digital currency I'm not likely to use in the near future... unless forced. Well that, and the fact they Canadian mint has just been ordered to stop producing the penny... Canada will penny free very soon. Anyway, I like the current system of Interac [wikipedia.org] and cash very much, thank you. With the Harper government busily trying to catch up to the U.S. in terms of snooping on its own citizens (not sure anyone could catch up to the British government... even the Chinese), the less I want to do with any form of Canadian government information network.

I liked Interac a lot until I stopped being a student and no longer get unlimited transactions. $0.65 for every transaction after 8 in a month!? And it's going up to $1 in June! I've shopped around a bit too and can't find anything that works out better than that. So now I just use my CC for everything and make sure I pay it off before getting interest.

Old news. Canada has had chip + pin for at least two years now. I'm pretty sure I've had my CC with chip and pin three and just got my debit last year with the c&p when my old swipable one wore out. I'd rather have the swipe since the chip cards take longer to process and are a pain in the ass. I'd rather swipe, put the card back in my wallet and leave when the transaction clears instead of waiting with it in the machine forever. And personally, I don't see what extra security a chip has over a magneti

My wife's originally from Canada, and I lived there for a while. I noticed that Canada would try new things, including tech, and later you'd see it in the states. They're smaller and more nimble (1/10th the population) and North American companies could try new things there and see if they work. Also, maybe there's the benefit of: if the idea crashes and burns, it's not noticed in the states and the company doesn't need to worry about damaging their brand in the states.

That would probably be because you've had a working solution (Interac) long before that, so there weren't that many incentives to introduce such a thing. Australia & New Zealand have a similar thing with EFTPOS.

Lower fees.Customer service.A more respectable business model. You know they close accounts for stupid reasons and just keep the cash don't you?No dirty trickys like converting non-USD debts to USD at their exchange rate in order to bump up the amount they claim people owe them.Terms and conditions that are not an exercise in customer abuse.

Was the summary written by an American by any chance? Canada embraced debit card transitions under the name "Interac" long before the US started experimenting with visa debit/check cards. I have a Interac bank card that I can use almost anywhere in Canada for making purchases which also works as a "visa debit" card in the US and as a visa that is tied to my checking account on some US online sites. We have been largely cashless for some time but I still like to have cash as a backup in case the interac network goes down which has happened quite a few times.

I remember one time going to the movies and I was one of a handful of people who actually had enough cash in the wallet to buy movie tickets and concession snacks while almost everyone else were up the creek without a paddle when the network went down in the entire city.

Canada embraced debit card transitions under the name "Interac" long before the US started experimenting with visa debit/check cards.

I got a debit card in Canada in 1984, at the first bank that implemented one without requiring me to consent to a credit check as part of the application process. It's like, dude, it's a debit card. You're only giving me my own money back. We may have been ahead of the States but we're still a bit slow in the head.

This system is supposed to handle micropayments. Yeah, the penny costs 1.6 cents to produce. But, because it's metal, it can easily survive being used in 10,000 transactions. This is equivalant to a surcharge of 0.016% per transaction. In the case of nickels/dimes/quarters and $1 and $2 coins, the overhead ratio becomes even more microscopic. Compare this with what credit card companies charge. From http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2009/04/16/f-cardfees.html [www.cbc.ca]

> Merchants pay two to four per cent of the sale price in various> transaction fees whenever they accept a credit card for payment.

> âoePlayers you wouldnâ(TM)t have thought of beforeâ are looking for> ways to get into the market of secure transactions, she said.

Well if you like the current designs on he Canadian bills, wait for the new ones as we replace all our paper money with difficult to counterfeit polymer notes. New $100 and $50 are already out with more to follow.

Actually, the new 50's (probably the 100's as well, but I've only seen the 50's in person) are still paper, they just have polymer *sections* in them. The majority (everything that isn't transparent) is still the same paper (well actually special fabric) as before.